


Falling a Step Behind

by justanothersong



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Cancer, Drug Use, M/M, Panic Attacks, Sex between Minors, Suicide
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-11-13
Updated: 2013-11-13
Packaged: 2018-01-01 09:50:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,498
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1043402
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/justanothersong/pseuds/justanothersong
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dean glared. “Cas is my best friend,” he shot back. “I do everything I can to help him, always have. I just can’t… I can’t keep track of him 24/7, okay? He’s a grown man, I can’t stop him.”</p><p>Meg sighed. “You can only pick up the pieces when he calls,” she said, shaking her head.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Warning for "underage" added for consensual sex between minors.  
> Thinking this will go to three chapters.

In the haze of early morning sleep, it took several rings before he realized that the noise invading his dreams was his cell phone vibrating on his night table. Several more rings passed before he was able to rub the sleep from his eyes and cast a tired glance at the phone’s glowing display screen. Recognizing the name with a groan, he thumbed the call button and answered with a grunt, collapsing back onto his pillows. One hand reaching up to pinch the bridge of his nose, Dean let out a long exhale.

“It’s almost four o’clock in the fucking morning, man,” he said by way of greeting. There was no real response, not at first, simple a stuttered choking sound that made Dean sit straight up in bed, eyes gone wide with alarm. “Cas?” he asked, voice almost breaking on the simple syllable. Another choking noise sounded before Dean heard his friend’s voice, a deep breathy sob before he began speaking.

“Dean,” he said, “Dean, I’m so sorry… I-I made a mistake, I’m s-sorry… I don’t wanna die, Dean, please… please help me…”

Dean was out of bed and out the door before even having thought to dress or put on a pair of shoes, running out towards his car in bare feet. It certainly wasn’t the first late night call from Cas, and definitely not the first begging for help, but there was a fear and a quiet desperation in the other man’s voice that set Dean on edge.

“Cas? Cas, what’s going on? What did you do?” he demanded, sliding into the driver’s seat of his car. Cas didn’t answer, only kept crying and apologizing over and over again, until his words dissolved into choking and retching. As the line got quieter, Dean kept increasing his speed, until he was practically flying down the old country roads that led to Cas’ family home, praying that he wouldn’t be too late.

 

The two had first met midway through their sixth grade year. Cas had begged and pleaded with his older brothers to be allowed to attend school in town and dispense with the fussy private tutor who had been home-schooling him since kindergarten days, never knowing that junior high was the worst time to choose to be the strange new kid in school – even worse when you were coming in at the middle of the school year. 

Dean had spotted the new face straight away, noting his nervous fidgeting, messy dark hair, and pale face. One of the school bullies had noticed too, and targeted Cas immediately; everyone was surprised when the morning bell rang to find Cas seated at his assigned desk, completely unruffled, while the bully was sporting a fat lip and the beginnings of a black eye. By lunchtime recess, the battered bully had amassed a small group of boys to ‘teach the new kid a lesson’ and Dean, hating to see an unfair fight, was at Cas’ side the moment the fray began.

By the time it ended, Dean and Cas were both grinning through bloody noses, made permanent friends by sharing the battle.

 

How long ago it seemed now, though Dean knew a scant twelve years had passed since that day in the schoolyard. Jumping out of his car to push open the old iron gates that stood before the Novak house, Dean wondered if things might have been better for Cas in the long run if he had never left the safety and privacy of his family home. There was no way to tell now, but Dean couldn’t help but think he’d gladly give up the times he’d had with his best friend, if only knowing that it would keep the other man safe.

The house was dark and cool when Dean entered, in spite of the late summer heat. It was all but silent, but that wasn’t at all unusual. Michael had started traveling extensively since Cas’ last hospital discharge, saying his youngest brother was old enough to fend for himself, and Gabe hadn’t passed more than a single night in the house since their mother had died. Still, it set Dean’s nerves on edge even further, worrying at the lack of noise after Cas’ desperate phone call. He found himself praying that it was a panic attack that had prompted the call – it wouldn’t be the first time Cas had called as his anxiety had crept up to pull him under once again. But still, deep down, Dean knew it was far worse than that. The tone of Cas’ voice and his pleading for forgiveness were clear indication that something more was wrong; Dean only hoped he had made it in time.

Cas’ bedroom was at the far end of a long hallway on the second floor of the house, tucked away like a dirty little secret even before his illness had taken hold. The door was ajar and Dean could see the soft yellow glow of a bedside lamp splashed across the floor. He broke into a sprint when he spotted the prone figure laying on the floor in the shadows.

The room reeked of booze and sick, a puddle of foamy vomit on the carpet next to Cas’ face, the man still clutching his cell phone like a lifeline in his right hand. For one paralyzing moment of horror, Dean thought his friend was dead, but then Cas took a shuddering breath and choke out more bloody foam onto his bedroom floor. Dean grabbed him by the shoulders and shook him hard, lifting him into a sitting position on the floor. The rattle of a half dozen or more prescription pull bottles sounded as Cas was moved, tablets and capsules scattering around them on the floor.

“Cas!” Dean barked, shaking his friend hard. “Cas, what did you do? What did you take?”

“Sorry Dean,” Cas mumbled in response, eyes still closed. “So sorry…”

“Damn it, Cas!” Dean snapped, and heaved the other man up onto his shoulder. He stood shakily, pausing only a moment to gain proper footing, before hurrying them both to his car.

 

Cas and Dean had only been 13 years old when Dean first witnessed one of Cas’ panic attacks. It had been a bad time for the Novaks, with Cas’ mother’s hyperchondria finally coming to fruition with the discovering of cancer in her lymph nodes. Cas had been a wreck even before the diagnosis, stressing over high school entrance exams and being pressured heavily by his eldest brother to take pre-college prep courses over the coming summer.

Their math teacher had stopped both boys in the hallway on their way out of school, warning them that their recent quiz grades had been surprisingly subpar, and Cas had just lost it. He started shaking and had gone deathly pale; Dean had kept calling his name but it was like the other boy could not even hear him, finally collapsing to the floor and curling into a tight little ball, still shaking and completely unresponsive. Dean had fought to ride in the ambulance that was called, and stayed at Cas’ bedside – thanks to some very compassionate emergency room nurses – even after the other boy’s family had arrived. It was Michael and Gabe who came, not their mother, and the older boys seemed to have no sympathy for their little brother.

Gabe had shaken his head and said, “Sorry, little bro. I just can’t deal with this right now,” and drifted outside to smoke.

Michael had declared his youngest brother to be “an attention-seeking cry-baby” in a flat and disinterested voice before retreating to the waiting room, leaving Dean alone with a heavily sedated Cas. He didn’t leave his friend’s side until his parents arrived and forcible removed him from the room. It was three weeks after that before he was able to see Cas again.

 

The emergency room doctors had a flurry of questions for Dean, most importantly asking over and over again what Cas had taken. Dean didn’t have any real answers for them, repeating over and over that there had been lots of pills, that some of the bottles looked like they had Cas’ mother’s name on the labels, and detailing the color and shape of what capsules he recalled seeing. His first priority had been getting Cas to the hospital, not taking inventory of the small pharmacy spilled out on his bedroom carpet.

Cas was a little too well-known at the local emergency room, it seemed. They eyed Dean warily, thinking he was another junkie or dealer dropping off an accidental overdose and getting ready to bolt before the police could come. But when Bobby Singer came in, fresh off a midnight shift at the local sheriff’s department, took one look at Dean and said, “Jesus, boy, what mess did you pull that idjit out of now?”, the mood among the nurses changed.

They realized that Dean was standing there, looking frantic and worried, in rumpled sweatpants and a faded t-shirt, without benefit of shoes or even socks. They realized he was covered in his friend’s vomit-tinged blood and completely uncaring of it, only wanting to know what they were doing to Cas, and if he would be alright. They realized he was terrified.


	2. Chapter 2

By then, hours had passed, and there was some tittering among the hospital staff as to what to do. Legally, they shouldn’t give Dean any information at all, but no one had ever showed up and stayed with Cas during an emergency room visit before. Finally, a younger nurse with dark curls and a heart-shaped face rolled her eyes at the others, slipping out from behind the desk and taking Dean by the arm while Sheriff Singer spoke with one of the orderlies.

“C’mon, kid, I’ll take you to see’im,” she announced with a sigh. She wore dark maroon scrubs that accentuated the paleness of her skin, dark circles under her eyes from far too many night shifts, and moved slowly as though too tired and aggravated to walk any faster; her nametag read ‘Meg’.

“Who’re you, anyway?” she asked, glancing over her shoulder as Dean followed. “We had Cas here drying out just two weeks ago, you weren’t here then.”

Dean frowned. “I didn’t know. He didn’t tell me,” he responded.

The nurse clucked her tongue. “Doesn’t surprise me,” she said. “Cas seems to keep most of his stuff to himself. Always alone when he rolls in, if someone isn’t dumping him out of the backseat of a car in front of the place.” She raised a skeptical eyebrow at Dean. “You seem to care a lot for someone who knows fuck all about him.”

Dean glared. “Cas is my best friend,” he shot back. “I do everything I can to help him, always have. I just can’t… I can’t keep track of him 24/7, okay? He’s a grown man, I can’t stop him.”

Meg sighed. “You can only pick up the pieces when he calls,” she said, shaking her head. “You must be Dean. He’s talked about you.”

Dean’s eyes widened in surprise. “He has?” he asked.

Meg gave another sad sigh. “Yeah,” she agreed. They had paused outside of a small cubicle with the curtains closed, and Meg leaned against a nearby pillar, hands clasped behind her back. She cocked her head to the side, seemingly evaluating Dean, before speaking again. “Only on the worst days. The ones where it gets really touch-and-go. He always… he asks us to tell you he’s sorry.”

 

Cas started apologizing when they were fifteen. The first time, Dean found him falling down drunk on a bottle of cheap vodka, sitting in the backseat of a car that Dean’s father had parked in their back field to begin restoring over the summer. 

“Cas? What the hell, man?” Dean had demanded angrily, pulling the smaller teen out of the door-less car and more or less tossing him into the dirt. Cas had been laughing at first but soon his chuckles dissolved into sobs, his hands wrapping around himself tightly as he knelt there on the ground.

“M’sorry, Dean… so sorry,” he cried, face a mess of spit and snot, starting to heave into the grass. “Sorry… I didn’t… I didn’t want you to see me like this, I just… couldn’t go home, couldn’t go there… couldn’t see her…”

And Dean did the only thing he could: he scooped his friend up into his arms, letting Cas lean onto his weight, bury his face in his shoulder and sob until there were no more tears left to cry and his already graveled voice was even deeper and more rough.

That night, Cas slept on Dean’s bedroom floor.

 

Meg pulled back the curtain and Dean gasped at the sight before him. Cas looked thin and sallow against the white sheets on the emergency room gurney, traces of something black around his pale blue-tinged lips. His eyes were closed but his chest was moving shakily with each exhale, hands clenched at his sides and body shivering. Automatically Dean moved towards him, pulling the soft blanket at his feet up to cover Cas’ body.

“Charcoal,” Meg explained quietly, pulling a cloth from a nearby cabinet and dampening it in the cubicle sink to clear away the blackness from Cas’ lips. “Coats the stomach to prevent absorption. It was too late to pump and not knowing what he took, might’ve made it worse anyway. Naloxone too. The way his heart was stopping, seemed there had to be some opiates.”

Dean’s had snapped up at her words. “His heart stopped?” he asked, alarmed.

Meg frowned down at the man in the bed, a certain fondness in her eyes. “He coded twice. Really went for the gold this time around. Lucky you got him here in time.”

“This time?” Dean echoed, staring at Meg in horror.

She shook her head. “Dean… you didn’t think this was the first?”

 

At 17, Cas climbed in Dean’s bedroom window in the middle of the night, strung out and exhausted, but sober. It was mid-November and he was freezing, and Dean wasted no time in pulling the other teen into his bed and underneath the thick blankets and afghan his mother had knitted. There were dark hollows beneath Cas’ eyes and bruises on his hands; it took only a moment for Dean to find a sticky medical electrode attached to Cas’ chest and ripped it away, even as Cas winced.

“What happened, Cas?” he whispered in the dark.

Cas cast his eyes down. “…Not important,” he responded after a moment.

“Yes it is,” Dean replied, tilting the other boy’s chin so their eyes met. Cas could look so innocent like this, looking up beneath thick dark lashes, light from the streetlamp outside the window reflecting the vibrant blue of his eyes, looking terribly young in spite of the shadows beneath his eyes and the stubble on his face. He bit his lower lip, shaking his tousled dark head.

“I just made a mistake,” he finally said. “I’m sorry. It won’t happen again.”

Dean sighed. “Jesus, Cas,” he muttered, and pulled the boy into a one-armed embrace, their heads sharing his pillow.

Cas leaned in, nuzzling into Dean’s shoulder. “Can I stay here?” he mumbled. “Don’t wanna go back to that house… not tonight.”

“’Course you can stay,” Dean told him, as though it weren’t a question at all. “You can always stay here, Cas, you know that.” His parents may have had other ideas – ‘bad influence’ was the term most thrown around the Winchester dinner table as of late – but to Dean, it was a nonissue. He’d always open the door to Cas, no questions asked.

 

Cas started thanking him, voice cracking even on his whispers, reaching a hand to touch fingertips to Dean’s jaw as he did. Over and over, the same words, moving closer and closer in the dark, until their noses were touching and their breath mingling, and Dean cast his green eyes down to Cas’ lips as the boy got even closer. The words stopped then, the two staring at each other, hearts thudding in tandem. It was a precipice they had inched towards for years, from the first time Dean looked at a lonely boy in the schoolyard and decided to be his friend.

It was Dean who had to bridge the distance, surge forward that little bit to brush his lips against Cas’. The tiny bit of contact was like flipping a switch in the other boy, who began peppering soft kisses all over Dean’s face before returning to his lips, licking at the seam of his lips until Dean opened to him with a soft little sigh.

It didn’t take long for the two to start exploring, past lips and tongues to the soft skin at the nape of Cas’ neck and the little hollow along Dean’s clavicle. They never meant for it to go far, but they were teenage boys, finally grasping at something they hadn’t even been able to put into words, and every moment seemed to be screaming just a little more, just a little more. Dean found every bruise and scrape on Cas’ skin and pressed his lips to them, trying to pretend the little red pinpricks on his forearms were just bug bites. Dean kissed each one, each time murmuring a quiet plea that Cas _stop, please just stop, please_.

They were slowing down, the warmth of the blankets and skin on skin combining with the late hour to make them sleepy, when Cas pressed his lips in what was meant to be a final kiss to the soft spot where Dean’s jawline met his ear; the sudden sharp shuddering intake of breath that met his ears pulled Cas sharply awake and he repeated the action, with more pressure and the gentle scrape of teeth on stubbled skin. Dean couldn’t help the soft little groan that escaped his lips and Cas couldn’t help but respond with lips and teeth and tongue, worrying at the little spot until Dean was shivering and they both knew there’d be a mark in the morning, but neither cared. Both were wide awake again, bodies pressed tightly together beneath the blankets, and Dean flushed hard when his arousal pressed against Cas, only to be greeted with an answering hardness. Kisses and nips gave way to wandering hands, clothing pushed up and discarded, and before Dean knew what was happening, he felt Cas’ lips against the bare expanse of his stomach, the other boy’s thumbs looped into the waistband of Dean’s boxers.

“Cas,” Dean gasped out, voice rough with sex. “Cas, you don’t gotta…”

“Want to,” Cas mumbled in reply, and that’s when Dean felt it, a strong hand encircling his cock, soft little kitten licks to the head that made him whimper and fall back against his pillow. There had been girls who had done this, tried this on him before, but it never felt like this, never felt like he couldn’t catch his breath for the lightning bolts of pleasure shooting up his spine.

Cas was clumsy but enthusiastic, and it was clear it was nothing he had ever attempted before, but there was a sureness to it, an eagerness to make Dean shake and come apart beneath the careful ministrations of his hands and lips. When Cas took him wholly into his mouth, Dean gasped out a curse and bit his lip, trying to keep from making any noise that might be heard by his sleeping parents or brother, all the while drifting one hand into the other boy’s messy dark hair, guiding his actions even as Dean began to tremble with want and pleasure.

He didn’t last long – couldn’t, not with as long as he’d wanted this, not with the way Cas had abandoned all pretense and any sense of holding back. Cas coughed and gagged but didn’t seem to mind, kissing his way back up Dean’s chest until their lips met again and Dean could taste himself on the other boy’s tongue. 

Dean fumbled a moment with the buttons on the jeans that Cas still wore, and when he finally slipped a hand inside, Cas growled against his mouth and bit down on his lower lip, earning an interested twitch from Dean’s spent cock. Dean started a slow teasing rhythm, just his fingertips at first, until Cas was panting and rocking his hips against Dean’s hand. He was more vocal and louder than Dean had expected, so he swallowed down the sounds with kisses, finally giving in and taking Cas fully in hand, hot and hard and so perfect against Dean’s palm. Cas came apart quickly, shaking and breathing out Dean’s name against his lips. They fell asleep wrapped in each other’s arms, twined together beneath the winter blankets.

Dean could never say for sure if anyone saw them that way, but there were extra towels in the bathroom that morning, and more than enough scrambled eggs at breakfast.

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by the song "Desperately Wanting", by Better Than Ezra.  
> Listen here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v74yTy1UTuk


End file.
